This is the official blog of Sgt Ellie Bloggs, a real live police sergeant on the front line of England. It's not the official opinion of my police force, but all the facts I recount are true, and are not secrets. If they don't want me blogging about it, they shouldn't do it. PS If you don't pay tax, you don't pay my salary.

Tuesday, November 21, 2006

PC Bloggs and the Unusual Case of the Email Harassment.

I deal with frequent cases of harassment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of these include some form of electronic communication, usually texts but also emails. I say unfortunately, because there is no possible way for British police officers to investigate these offences.If I read the texts the victim has received in order to establish whether or not a harassment has taken place, I am acting lawfully. But as soon as I take crazy actions like reading the texts for the deliberate purpose of writing down the telephone number they have come from, I have over-stepped the mark. In practice I do this anyway, but hey, I'm just a rebel.I once "investigated" a case of EMAIL HARASSMENT. I can almost hear you gasping: "Investigated? Surely not!" This is the course my investigation took:

Attended address and read emails sent to victim.

Agreed that the emails constituted rather nasty death threats including the words "garotte", "entrails" and "die". There were exaggerating features such as the fact that the vicitm was involved in problems with mafiosi in Pakistan.

Submitted the contents to the Department of Paper-grinders to authorise a trace on the headers.

Received response that as Yahoo was an international company, this was impossible. Never mind the fact that the sender was thought to be in the UK and you can buy software that will trace the sender to his home computer for under £8 ($12).

Informed the victim there was nothing the police could do, but for £8 an unscrupulous net-service could do the job in a second.

The victim was not particularly happy. Fortunately this was not one of the cases where she was later stabbed to death.

Note:You might be asking yourselves at what point during the investigation did I consider the option that the victim might be an ex-KGB spy who had defected, who was at risk of poisoning at any moment?

The answer is, I ALWAYS consider that option - it's more of an undying hope really.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Copyright of PC Bloggs.

Oh no! You are right anon I thought the shipping price was the price of the product - good marketing there then. There are cheap ones about from www.visualware.com and www.reverserecords.org or this one which shows you the route your email took to get to you. http://map.butterfat.net/emailroutemap/ getpoints.pl.

Due to customer related incident, the issue of mobilephone tracking became relevant. Que desperate headshakes and quantity of cold sweat being thrown about by the gov as he realised that the dreaded 4am authorisaton phonecall would have to be made...Only to find out that there is a UK company on-line who offers phone tracking service for fraction of the cost we are currently having to pay...